☉ ☽ ☿ ♀ ♂ ♃ ♄ ♅ ♆ ♇ ⊕ ☊ ☋
“Stuff your eyes with wonder. Live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
— Ray Bradbury
We are fast approaching the final eclipses of the year. The season is already on us, but the window has yet to open. When it does, that is where the story gets interesting.
When ☉ and ☽ meet at a node, the light changes. Two weeks later they meet at the other node, and it changes back. Between them: the Dragon Hole (eclipse window). It’s in this space that the plot thickens, twists, and spits us out the other side, left trying to put the pieces together again. Always eventful, sometimes ominous, and never to be missed.
The solar eclipse arrives 12 August at 20°01′ ♌︎ and cracks the space open. The lunar follows on the 27th/28th, straddling 4°54′ ♓︎ and ♍︎, and seals it shut. One dragon, two ends, three bodies. Most of the focus here will be on the solar eclipse.
And the nodal axis is moving while it happens. The true nodes stepped into ♌︎/♒︎ on July 27th; the mean nodes don’t follow until the 18th of this month, which puts the crossing inside the dragon hole itself. King and the crowd. Us and them. Steven Forrest vs. the astrology “community.” It’s a reset having something to do with the Emperor’s wardrobe (more on that HERE).
Note also that the solar eclipse is a south node eclipse, meaning the new moon is near it. Its family is called 10 South. The name is important.
Every eclipse belongs to a Saros family, and most of the families are quite old. Brady reads each as a birth chart whose first eclipse sets a tone that hums through every member for a thousand years or so. This one was born 10 March 1179, ☉ and ☽ at 26° ♓︎ squared by ♄ and ♇ in ♊︎. It’s disenchantment under pressure. The suffocation we feel by the status quo. Or the dreamer who constructs a wall around their own imagination. However it manifests, it can feel crippeling.
That March, the Third Lateran Council turned its attention to the communities the Church called Cathars—also Patarenes or Publicani—spreading through Gascony, Albi, Toulouse, and beyond. Rome said their “loathsome heresy” had grown so strong that they no longer concealed their supposed wickedness, but taught openly and drew “the simple and weak” to their side. Canon 27 placed not only the Cathars but also those who sheltered, supported, or traded with them under anathema: no home, no commerce, no Mass, no Christian burial. Whether one views them as heretics or as a persecuted spiritual counterculture, the Council’s language shows a movement being publicly marked as an enemy of the Christian order.
They were not sorcerers. They were austere dualists who taught that the visible world is the prison of the soul, and that release comes through the consolamentum — a baptism of fire and spirit meant to free the light trapped inside a human being.
The light being trapped inside is the idea. Our lives as an eclipse of the Truth, and the work of a life being to get the light back out. And the Church role here, displaying the ♄/♇ square to the eclipse. Think: early 2020, with the last ♄/♇ conjunction. Who was wielding the unfair power then?
Brady does not delineate 10 South as catastrophe. Her words, verbatim: “This Saros Series concerns itself with breaking out of a very negative situation where no hope can be seen to a more positive space containing many options. A worry that may have been affecting a person will suddenly clear. The solution is shown by the Cosmos and needs to be taken up without too much delay.”
Not an impossible prison. A door-or window—does show a way out.
This family is not fully that the walls close in. It’s our perception of the constriction of freedom and the invitation to work around it. To be imaginative about it. For the Cathars, they did it by being socially embedded and by becoming mobile, clandestine, and clever in avoiding the Inquisitors.
Again, these are nuanced themes which exist in the eclipse family the upcoming solar eclipse lives in. Sometimes we can see them, sometimes we can’t. It’s subtle, yet worthy of knowing about.
We turn now to Japan, for a grief story with an eclipse rolled into it for some mythic context.
Amaterasu is the Sun. She’s not a symbol of the Sun, not a finger pointing at it — she’s the goddess who is the light of the world. And her brother Susanoo is the storm, the violence, and the refusal of limitation. One day, he tears through her fields and her halls until something in her breaks. He breached her limits (♄) and her response is curious.
She doesn’t fight back. She does something anti-solar, instead. She retreats.
Amaterasu withdraws into a cave, rolls a stone shut behind her, and the world goes dark. Every field and face, every crop and creature: dark—or almost. They say this was the original eclipse. Not an event in the sky but a deep sulk— the light choosing the dark because the world had become unworthy to shine on.
The other gods have a curious response to all this.
They do not pray or mourn or take a battering ram to the stone and drag the Sun back into a world that had already proved it didn’t deserve her. None of that. They throw a party, instead.
They gather at the mouth of the cave and have a rager. Amenouzume climbs onto an overturned tub and dances ecstatically. They say she went kamugakari. Ecstatic or God-taken or possessed by some otherworldly force. Intoxicated by something that wasn’t poured by Dionysus. The dance turns wild, then obscene, and the gods roar with laughter loud enough to shake the mountain...and nudge the stone a bit.
Then, the birds begin to respond out of the quiet of the eclipse.
It’s the roosters calling dawn before there is any dawn to call. They are announcing the light as though it had already returned.
And the ‘light,” hearing all this, gets curious.
Amaterasu moves the stone by a sliver, just enough to ask what could possibly be so funny in a world she had personally plunged into darkness. And in that crack they had sneakily hung a mirror.
And so, she sees a light, not realizing it’s her own. She leans toward it, and they take her by the hand. This is how the Sun is pulled back into the world by her own reflection and the sound of a party that would not stop.
.: :.
The Sabian symbol for 21° ♌︎ — the degree this eclipse rounds into — is intoxicated chickens dizzily flapping their wings. A dizzy, drunken, absurd flock beating their wings at a dawn that has not happened. The rooster crowing into the false morning. The birds set flapping to sing the light home. A close match to the myth, and a very wyrd instruction to receive in a crisis.
The Cathars said the trapped light is freed by fire and spirit. Amaterasu’s council said laughter and a mirror would do the trick. Brady says the door opens on its own and we are given these chances every 18 years. Three answers to one question, none complete or clear, but all ways of rescuing the light.
Nobody overthrows the darkness, nor does anybody argue the Sun out of the cave. It’s more of a realization of what truly sets the spirit free and how to act when it feels like the walls are closing in.
Again, eclipses are an inversion of a story's narrative. It takes the thing everyone is most certain of and turns it over while the light changes. It’s hard to put into words, yet you know it when you see it. This idea works wonders in markets too. If bulls enter the Dragon Hole, they exit as bears, and vice versa. It’s fascinating.
Our ancestors cared about the eclipse path above all — if it wasn’t overhead, why would it matter? We’ve mostly dropped that. We overlay the eclipse onto the natal chart, find the house and aspects, and forget about the geography (for the most part). It’s good to consider it all, especially the eclipses within the Saros family. For instance:
1. 1 August 2008—the previous one. Its shadow ran from Nunavut across northern Greenland and the Arctic, through central Russia, eastern Kazakhstan and western Mongolia, before setting in China. The banking crisis was already underway. In the following week, fighting over South Ossetia intensified on 7 August; Russia’s large-scale assault on Georgia began on the 8th, the same day Beijing opened the Olympic Games. Then, forty-five days after the eclipse, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and the long-stuck global financial crisis broke into its most acute phase. The crisis was not the eclipse. The eclipse opened the window into the Dragon Hole; then the stories began to twist and turn. It also began away from the eclipse path, a point for the team who say the path doesn’t matter too much.
2 · 12 August 2026-this one. Arctic Ocean, Greenland, Iceland, northern Spain, a corner of northeastern Portugal. Two minutes eighteen at maximum. Member forty-eight of seventy-two. We’ll see if it’s more of the World Cup good luck for Spain or the bad luck with the fires and immigration chaos. Perhaps a point then for the eclipse path team. We’ll have to confirm on the other side of it.
3 · 23 August 2044-next one. North America — and by then these eclipses move out of ♌︎ entirely, to 0°55′ ♍︎. This month is the last time this family speaks in the key of a lion’s roar. Themes from the start persist, but each eclipse offers its own flavor and lessons.
Earlier this year, teaching a class on the eclipses of 2026, I kept circling Spain, because that is where most of the totality lands in the upcoming eclipse. Since then, Spain has won a World Cup, burned through a brutal fire season, and sat at the center of Europe’s hardest argument about who gets to come in. Which raises a question I don’t think we ask often enough: how wide is the aperture on eclipse influence? Does the path concentrate the story even before it happens? We know that they linger afterward — sometimes for years — but can they also have premonitions? Seems like it with Spain this round...
Then, on the 13th, one day into the Dragon Hole, under a sky with no Moon whatsoever, the Perseids peak. Up to a hundred an hour, the best conditions in over a decade. May we be blessed with clear skies for both, though always have that extra awareness when gazing at an eclipse if you are along the path. It’s not just your eyes you should be worried about.
It’s often best to just do your practice, and listen to Jyotishis on this one…
.: :.
So, the dragon eats the Sun, an ecstatic woman dances on a tub, and a bird sings a morning into existence, rescuing the light. You may not think these stories matter, but if the world is made up of stories, and these ones dance close to the essence of this eclipse season, then we might as well entertain them. Even if it’s only an image you take with you into it, who knows how it may help. You may end up with a hilarious chicken story to share when it’s all said and done.
What light have you sealed off, and what did the world do to make you do it? ...♌︎ wants it expressed regardless of how badly it was handled last time.
Where do these two land in your chart — especially the solar at 20° ♌︎? ... it's the lion and the wardrobe.
And think back to August 2008, the last time this family was active. What emerged and how does it relate to some of these themes?
The light does not return because we demand it; it returns because someone out there was having such a good time that it coaxed the excited photons straight out of us. Eclipses have a funny way of working us and forcing us to deal with how we tell our stories.
Enjoy the wyrdness of it all and don’t forget to be reflective on their strange powers. Remain curious and open to learn from them, always. And look to where it’s all constellating in your own chart, then go from there. Try to track just how your story changes from start to finish--solar to lunar--tail to the head of this dragon.
Good luck out here--especially for those along the paths.
Note: I started with an entire section including the lunar eclipse but had to cut it. Once I breach 2k words, the editor comes out in me. It’s not that it’s not important; it’s just that the solar eclipse is more relevant this season.
If you’d like an eclipse-specific reading for this window, I’m here. There’s also the 2026 eclipse class, which goes deeper on the paths and the Saros families.
Predictive Astrology: The Eagle and the Lark. Brady, Bernadette.
The Sabian Symbols; Jones, Marc Edmund.
Third Lateran Council, 1179, Canon 27
NASA GSFC eclipse catalog..
~ Adam
....to support my work and learn astrology all at the same time
...and schedule a reading or learn from my classes
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